Armed and Fabulous

By Jonathan Miles

Published: April 25, 2004

HAVE YOU HEARD

By Anderson Ferrell.

295 pp. New York:

Bloomsbury. $23.95.

''The gay label is limiting in the same way that the Southern label is limiting,'' the novelist Jim Grimsley has said. ''It is an imperfect description.'' More limiting still is the literary subgroup created by combining those labels. Three of the South's canonical writers -- Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers -- could be readily classified as ''gay Southern authors,'' but that kind of pinpoint taxonomy comes up short; in the space between gay and Southern, much of their work sneaks out.

At times the same could be said of Anderson Ferrell, who publishes a novel every decade or so and whose first two novels received widespread critical acclaim. ''Where She Was'' (1985) was an earnest, Christ-haunted story about a North Carolina tenant farm family. Ferrell came out, in a sense, in his second novel, ''Home for the Day'' (1994), which saw a gay New Yorker returning south to his boyhood home to decide the fate of his dead lover's remains. With his new novel, ''Have You Heard,'' however, Ferrell seems content to let gayness and Southernness dance away, arm in arm, with his book. If the labels are limiting, so be it; Ferrell revels in the small space they provide him.

This is apparent from the novel's opening bang. A television reporter named Muff Martin, broadcasting live from Branch Creek, N.C., recounts how a local florist and decorator named Jerry Chiffon, while dressed in a red wool crepe lady's suit of ''the kind favored by Nancy Reagan,'' plucked a pistol ''from a fake Chanel purse and fired a round of shots'' at a North Carolina senator, Henry Hampton, a right-wing firebrand who if not explicitly modeled on Jesse Helms certainly shares the same philosophical suit size. Because the senator escapes unharmed, and because the characters are named Muff and Chiffon (you half expect a sheriff named Meringue to drive up), and because the would-be assassin's ''navy-and-white spectator pumps'' are so deliciously noted, you might think that a madcap, batter-fried and wobbly-heeled comedy is set to follow. What follows instead is the baroquely dark-hearted back story of why Jerry Chiffon -- the gayer-than-gay pride of Branch Creek's matron set, their own ''Queer Eye'' arbiter of style and taste -- donned a conservative size 16 pantsuit and took some poorly aimed potshots at a homophobic senator.

Assassinations may serve many purposes, but they are rarely in good taste, which is why Jerry's fumbled effort catches so many in Branch Creek by open-mouthed surprise. ''There has seldom been a wedding in this town that he didn't have a say in one way or the other -- flowers, music, dresses,'' explains one of the several women who, with gossipy asides and porch-rocker long-windedness, help narrate Jerry's tale. Knowledge of peau de soie evening dresses and proper curtain lengths, however, didn't come naturally to Jerry. He is the son of a Jeeter Lester-ish tobacco farmer, and his mother died, when Jerry was 7, while giving birth to a doomed baby with a head the size of a late-summer watermelon. After his mother's death, one of the ladies recalls, ''a lot of the women of Branch Creek . . . went to the Chiffon place to help out for a little while . . . but we had Jerry into that kitchen with us right from the start. We put an apron on him, wrapped the strings around his waist about three times and tied it good and tight, and he did the things a woman would have done ever since.'' And thus began Branch Creek's fey rendition of the Pygmalion myth, with the town's ladies who lunch -- led by the tidy-minded and socially supreme Mrs. Lyman L. Labrette -- funneling all their manor-house refinement into the half-orphaned boy until, when he was old enough, they put him on the Palmetto Express train to Manhattan for a postgrad degree in good taste.

Jerry arrived in Greenwich Village ''at a time when the highest ambitions of most of its inhabitants were sexual,'' Ferrell writes, before launching into coming-of-age scenes that gently evoke those of another North Carolina novelist, Allan Gurganus, who followed another giddy bumpkin into the heady, prelapsarian days of bathhouse-and-disco-era Manhattan in his novel ''Plays Well With Others'' (1997). Jerry's quest for the secrets of taste is swiftly displaced by a quest for the dissident carnality of Christopher Street, but not wholly so: he falls into an affair with Handiford Pepper Crompton, called Handy, scion ''of one of the richest and most prominent families in the North,'' who provides Jerry yet another entry to the lush life.

But the rich and tasteful, as Jerry discovers (first in Manhattan, then later back home in Branch Creek), can have their dark quirks. At an orgy held at a private village in the Pennsylvania countryside, a rococo event featuring naked coachmen with whips and ''16 naked French-horn players in the branches of an enormous old oak tree,'' Handy, in leather disguise, has a wickedly purposeful encounter with his own father. Soon thereafter, Handy -- unhinged by his Oedipal baggage -- is beaten to death by fundamentalist thugs after he makes a wisecrack about Jesus. And so the grief-stricken Jerry, his anger ''as savage as his taste was refined,'' returns home to Branch Creek, buys a pantsuit and a pistol and pops off a few futile rounds at Senator Hampton.

Huh? Exactly. For all its campy plot thrust, the shooting is the novel's weakest device; it comes to feel awkwardly jammed into the story, like an unfortunate centerpiece on an otherwise immaculately appointed dinner table. With a flashback to Jerry's first encounter with the senator, at an overly archetypal Klan rally to which his father dragged him, Ferrell tries to weave the senator more tightly into the story, but the scene feels obligatory, as do Jerry's young perceptions of the ''hateful Henry Hampton'' spouting words that were, naturally, ''bad and mean.'' Action is character, as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, but action and character never fully jibe in Jerry Chiffon. When Mrs. Labrette, Jerry's mentor (and something else to him, as we discover in a fourth-quarter plot twist), finds it hard to ''believe most of what she was seeing and hearing'' about the shooting, it's easy to sympathize with her; neither can we. But if Jerry's misguided shots fail to drop his target, Ferrell's mismanaged plot device fails to spoil his novel. His melodious backtracking and sweet-tea atmospherics, along with his catty eye for small-town social distinctions and his keen ear for fence-line gossip, imbue much of ''Have You Heard'' with a juicy charm. Like the world at large, though, it would be far better off without gay-baiting politicians and town-square gunfire.